I don't believe the Weather Underground was ever a serious threat, except in their own minds, and in the press. When I looked around I saw dozens of easy targets that they just ignored. They were more publicity hounds than a revolutionary movement. AFAIK they didn't even have a platform of "What we would do if we were in charge".
And if you say Anonymous will become the same kind of thing, I have no trouble accepting it. But consider what you are saying. (I.e., they're just about there already.)
I really doubt that they would agree to something likely to put them out of business unless they were coerced.
I haven't been following things, but my presumptions are: 1) the business is (essentially) innocent 2) there was no warrant 3) The FBI used "main force" 4) They'll get away with it again
Will they find evidence? Maybe. Did they shut down the business? Almost certainly.
That said, these are initial presumptions. Some comments have caused me to believe that this time the FBI didn't seize servers that will actually put the company out of business. But I've heard of no evidence of a warrant, so I'm assuming that they've acted as they did in a few other cases that I've heard of.
The actions of the FBI that I've heard of do not indicate that they are very interested in protecting the rights of the accused. And also that if they doubt that they'll be able to get enough evidence to convict their target, that they are willing to use extra-legal means to cause them severe financial damage. In one case where I'm personally aware, the (eventually) accused was able to get a decent pro-bono lawyer. (He couldn't hire one, because all his assets had been seized.) Last I heard he'd been fighting the charge for years. Not many pro-bono lawyers will support you through that. He's probably going to loose. Because he has expenses that he can no longer meet. But, I'll admit, this was the DEA not the FBI, so that poor evidence, even though it does shape the lens through which I read these stories. (The charge? He was a doctor charged with prescribing too much pain medication for cancer patients on welfare.)
Perhaps I shouldn't think of the FBI the same way, but reports in the news show that they follow a similar pattern of behavior, so I think that it *IS* fair.
Actually, things written 100 years ago will probably not be covered. But things written today will be covered 100 years from now.
The difference is that most works written 100 years ago probably had the copyright lapse at some point during that century. And from that time forwards they were not covered. The laws changed sometime after 1980. (In the US...different times elsewhere. After WWII, I believe, everywhere.)
N.B.: In the US works written in 1923 may still be within copyright, depending on how the copyright was handled. (Renewals, etc.), but things written in 1915 aren't. On the years in between, I'm not certain. (But notice that the "Lord of the Rings" was out of copyright in the US in the 1970's because it was published first in Britain. And US law at that time required that for a work to be copyright in the US it could not have been published earlier in another country. (Read the back of the Ballentine Edition of the Lord of the Rings. I'm not sure about the current editions, but the first ones made a point that Ballentine had chosen to pay Tolkien royalties, where Ace had not.
A decade or two? Ah, yes. Long enough that knowing what they were doing becomes irrelevant, because now someone else is the one in charge. When that happens, prosecutions somehow don't follow, so there are NO effective repercussions to doing whatever they feel like.
There's more than one reason that "Justice delayed is justice denied" is a correct statement.
Yes, because you don't just need to delete the names, you need to hide the events that would allow the sources to be identified. Figuring out just which events those are can be quite difficult.
I do consider promulgating beliefs without evidence that I will accept to encourage others into actions that I feel will harm others to be, itself, harmful.
It's ok for me to feel this way, because I'm not a lawmaker. If I were...I'd have to consider my own beliefs dangerous. Not, however, necessarily as dangerous that those of the other legislators around.
I consider ALL centralized authority to be an evil. This extends to authoritative nameservers. We need to create workable mesh networks to take the place of the current web structure. We probably need multiple networks of trust. I wouldn't trust RMS to pronounce on quantum theory, and I wouldn't trust Hawking to design philosophies of trust. Trusted parties need to be categorized as to where they are to be trusted. And we also need degrees of trust. An all or nothing system isn't going to be the answer.
This means that in my beliefs, whenever someone is acting to centralize power, they are, inherently, doing evil. This is true despite what they intend to accomplish by the centralized power they obtain. Abd the minimum amount of evil that they are doing is directly proportional to the degree to which they centralize power. A good kind will be succeeded by a bad king, but the power once gathered will not be dispersed by it's holder.
OTOH, it's worth noticing that for some purposes we don't seem to have any alternative but the centralization of power. This remains an evil, which acts continuously to counterbalance any good that is done through the exercise of that power. (And to amplify any evil.)
So... mesh networks are a partial answer, but what about power generation? Water distribution? Etc. For some purposes it doesn't look like an answer is currently conceivable. Dense populations seem to impose constraints that require the centralization of control over resources. But we still need to find ways away from this. (Note, however, that need does not imply capability. And, like good, evil comes in degrees.)
But to me the spreading of false information is an evil. The spreading of seductive information that cannot be shown to be true is also an evil, and perhaps a worse one. (But consider the difference between British and American libel law. Things aren't all that clear.)
If I'm recalling my history correctly, in Rome c. 0 C.E. the only form of marriage that had any legal standing was a contract. Only parties with significant property holdings bothered with it. It generally worked fairly well.
Personally, I'm in favor of marriage. But it needs to be looked at as a civil contract with a standard format (subject to amendments, essentially prenuptial agreements). And I see no reason why any two sentient and consenting entities shouldn't be allowed to marry if they choose. I'd even allow multi-party marriages, but that, or course, would require a custom contract.
For that matter, if two such entities choose to co-habit without such an agreement, that's ok with me too. But it might well be to the disadvantage of one party or the other...or even both.
You're focusing on superficials. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Starbucks. What's wrong is the Mega-Church building itself.
Actually, even the Mega-Church building would be reasonable if it were being put to some ends beyond the furtherance of centralized power. (Well, some ends, not just any old ends.)
What's wrong with the Mega-Churches is the exact same thing that's wrong with the Mega-Corporations. They no longer serve their original purpose, but are instead mere vehicles for the creation of centralized power. (In the case of the church, this was very intentionally crafted into the structure of it by Emperor Constantine, or perhaps his advisers. Creators of that eminently Christian slogan "In hoc signo vincis.")
Reality impaired is a good name for you. As you slide over, there's no way to determine who the affiliates are. So to claim that you authorized those (previously) unknown people to spam you is... peculiar. It's at most legally true, and not true in any ethical, moral, or sensible way.
Then there's the matter of reading all the agreements on the web sites that you have signed up at. This is, frankly, impossible. They change those things without notice to those who have previously agreed to them, and there's commonly a phrase in there that claims that it's YOUR responsibility to keep yourself informed. Clearly an impossible chore. And intentionally so.
I don't believe that those agreements are legally valid, particularly since there is no way for you to prove that you didn't agree to something that someone falsely claims you agreed to. IANAL, so my opinion on this doesn't carry much weight, but *I* am certainly not going to accept that I am responsible for something that I don't believe I agreed to. And someone showing me a web page that they claim is the agreement isn't likely to convince me. I know how quickly those can be changed. (They could change them to whatever they choose for 10 seconds every midnight. Do what they are now authorized to do. And then change it back. I'd never know.)
This is, however, why I prefer to only agree to licenses that I trust. Like the GPL. But this doesn't mean I'm going to believe that it's just to hold people trapped by the above described shenanigans to those agreements. People have limited amounts of time and limited fields of understanding. This is true of everyone. Requiring that everyone be an expert in some particular field is grossly unjust.
While I agree entirely with what you say, I feel that you make one major mistake.
"The kinddom of god is within you"
Try taking that literally. LITERALLY.
I have had such an experience as I believe you are describing. I have had it several times in various different circumstances. Once at a Wicca ceremony, once immediately after an intense encounter. (Don't know quite how to describe it. It was a splinter group off of EST related to the rebirthing movement.) A few other times.
My conclusion is that the entities described are real, but not external. That they are a part of the mechanism of the mind, and are probably related to the psychoid processes that C.G. Jung called Archetypes. And that many of them are pre-human. (There isn't just one, but it also isn't possible to draw clear boundaries around them. Think of them as activations of sections of the neural net that is the brain that normally aren't made consciously accessible.)
There's no reason to think that it didn't come from space. We know that complex organic molecules are synthesized in the dust clouds. Now the question is *what* came from space?
When I was a teenager I came up with what I called the "cosmic garbageman" theory for the evolution of life. Picnickers leaving garbage behind. There's no reason to believe it didn't happen, but it doesn't seem to be a necessary precondition.
Then there's panspermia. Another idea that's vaguely plausible if you believe that "spontaneous creation" is too unlikely. This only requires life to develop a civilization once in a galaxy. It's possible. I don't think it's the way to bet, but there's no proof that it didn't happen that way. (That would require finding life somewhere else that had a radically different underpinning in a similar environment. And even that could be handled if you presume two eco-system-civilizations launching spores into space. We could probably do it now if we felt like it.
These are ways of handling the problem if you feel that life is too unlikely. But I don't feel any need to adopt them. They seem like excess baggage.
Actually single mutational events can be retracted. And this does occasionally happen.
The reason we tend to say that evolution can't be reversed is basically entropy, i.e., the same reason you can't unscramble an egg (if you haven't gotten to the point of turning on the fire).
I'd say that it was fair to call it an irreversible process except that occasionally single mutational events are reversed exactly. But the process is generally so complex that the chance of this happening is generally extremely slight. And instead you get something like a dolphin or orca instead of a shark.
Yeah, I'm being picky. I'm a programmer, what did you expect.
Yeah. People have trouble with wrapping their heads around evolution.
Most change is detrimental. Most changes don't survive.
Some changes are advantageous in particular environments. These will tend to survive. Then the environment in which they lives changes, and they'll be wiped out.
So it's beneficial if you can come up with a way to insulate yourself from changes in the environment. But if it's too expensive, then it will be detrimental, and it won't survive.
Evolution is a process of tripination. (Decimation is killing one out of ten, so I coined tripination to mean killing one out of three. It still understates the case.) Changes happen and are killed off. The occasional survivor is what we see. And chance plays a large role in two places. First chance determines which mutations, out of all those that are currently viable, actually occur. Secondly chance plays a large role in selecting among those candidates while there are still only a few copies of a change. (See "The law of large numbers" and probability theory.)
People aren't good at selecting gambling odds, either, for similar reasons. They can't wrap their heads around probability. Evolution is worse, though, because you're dealing with cumulative change and death. Both of those are concepts that people don't deal well with.
But arguing against "The popular concept of evolution" isn't arguing against evolution, and shouldn't be framed as such. Changing the name wouldn't help, as people have a hard time understanding the ideas, and if they are afraid of death they'll likely just refuse to think about it.
Exactly *what* private data is Google intending to profit from? It makes a big difference.
If what they're doing is collecting bank account passwords, then, yes it's nefarious, even though the data was unencrypted.
If what they're doing is associating IPs with geo-locations, as they claim, I don't really like it, but I don't see anything really wrong. And it's clear how they could profit from that information.
They claim to be doing the second, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. They claim to have collected some data of the first sort by accident. I wish they'd destroy it, though I understand why they can't at the moment.
There's a couple of federal agencies that are supposed to be investigating this. One has cleared Google of malice and basically said "Go and sin no more". The other is still considering. These agencies have proper grounds, and have been dealt with reasonably. The Connecticut AG is a grandstanding politico on the make. He doesn't have grounds. He doesn't have a case. He's making political speeches. Google correctly told him to come back with a warrant, and he's trying to figure out something that he can escalate into grounds for one. Given that he just needs to find one pliable judge, he will likely get a warrant for something eventually. It won't be just, but it's the kind of corruption of the justice system that politics encourages.
What Google should have done was heavily redacted the documents, and then destroyed the originals before announcing the problem. Hindsight is marvelous. And it's too late to do it now without massive consequences.
Do I trust Google? No. But in this particular case I trust Google more than I trust the Connecticut A.G.
On the part of the Connecticut AG it *is* a fishing expedition. And he has no probable cause to suspect that any law was broken. (Should he have? Possibly. But that would require different laws.)
Note that the request for data didn't come from either of the federal agencies that you identified. (And it should still be handled via the courts and judicial warrants.)
What percentage of the cases would you expect to find out about? Why? I'm actually surprised that any were found. (Not that any happened, that any were found.) This seems, to me, to indicate that it happens an unsettlingly large percentage of the time.
And no, 4-4.5 years ago isn't a long time ago. You have to allow time for the incident to be proven, and court cases can run decades. (Not usually, but it's not uncommon either.)
I'll grant that Google is probably capable of providing itself with a decent defense, but it also has image and stockholders to think about. In this case, among at least some population segments, it doesn't lose face by not acquiescing to an intrusive governmental request. But corporations often do, and without any need for laws to be broken. (Except, of course, by disclosing information to the government that is forbidden by contractual agreement except under a court order, but without the formality and bother of there actually being a court order.)
That's ok though. They'll change the EULA on their web page so that it's technically legal...at least arguably so, and claim that since the agreement now reads that you agreed to these terms, that makes them the terms that you agree to.
I don't think very much of the morals of the people who run either corporations or the government. But Google, so far, is doing better than most. (But I still wouldn't trust them with my data in the cloud. Unless it was strongly encrypted.)
There are other good explanations (see other posts), but perhaps the other governments didn't want individual identifiers, and Connecticut does? Perhaps Connecticut just said "Give me all the data you colleced" and the others said "Give us the information you collected which you shouldn't have under our laws".
That sounds to me not only plausible, but reasonable. And Connecticut couldn't have said the same thing, because there weren't any laws to break. (But note that Germany, etc., would only have been given data about their own denizens, where if Connecticut was asking that way, it would be asking for everything.)
Sorry, that bit was almost a joke. (Though I haven't heard it claimed that it's good for you, and I'm not going intentionally go looking for misinformation. The bit about "swimming in cold water" is based around pigs eating copra, and laying down a layer of unmetabolized coconut fat, i.e., copra. So the pig fat didn't end up tasting right. It would, however, be good insulation for swimming in cold water, which the polynesians did/do a bunch of. And the polynesians tend to have a genetic mod which causes their fat layers to be distributed all over their body. So it's not totally a joke.
As for fish...yeah, the omega-3's are for fish (non-homeothermic) that swim in cold water. This doesn't mean that we use it the same way. Our biochemistrys (homeothermic) are significantly different. Most of the data used to recommend it are based around population studies rather than around theories. And I trust the population studies more than I trust ANY of the current theories. (Though they *can* hide significant variables that people just didn't think to look for.)
Some of the problems with personalized medicine are certainly economic. But a far cry from all, or even most, of them. E.g., many variations exist in personal biochemistry, but we don't know which ones are significant. This would require long term studies of a significant fraction of the worlds population, after identifying each participant by they proteome as well as by their genome. Just not doable. Perhaps at some point we'll be able to make a retrospective study, but then we'll need to identify exactly which choices which people made, how significant they were, and to what extent they were driven by physiology. (E.g., it's well know that generally men are more interested in eating meat than women? Is this important physiologically? Beneficial or harmful? To what extent? It is driven by physiology or custom? We'd need to do that kind of analysis for each metabolic variation.)
Basically, we just don't really know enough.
P.S.: If you heard the tone as whining, I think that says more about you than about me, because I don't feel that way. The fact that in the absence of hard data I feel I must gamble I consider to be a common part of the human condition. (And, for that matter, of the animal and plant condition.) This is because time is, so far as we know, irreversible.
Maybe what the trick with vinegar does is cause it to percipitate before being digested? (Though I think the explanation I heard was more along the lines of "All acetates are soluble", so iron acetate will go into solution, where iron oxalate would be insoluble.)
That was my first question too. The answer appears to be "No".
What they're claiming is that the evidence seems to indicate that the hypothesis that aging is caused by free radicals is false. This doesn't mean that free radicals are beneficial. (Sometimes they are beneficial. E.g., they are known to sometimes be one of the defenses used invading bacteria. This, however, doesn't mean that they are more generally beneficial.)
The suggestion was made that the purpose of the free-radicals is to activate the cell's stress repair mechanism. This seems a bit dubious to me, but evolution often doesn't design things in the most straight-forward way. So I can't just say "That's too silly to believe" as is my immediate desire.
Basically they're saying is "The evidence refutes the idea that free-radicals cause aging. We don't know why the are created. And we don't know what causes aging. Does anyone have any good ideas?"
Slashdot Mirror
It might not generate more wealth, but perhaps it acts to redistribute it?
It's not exactly a fallacy. (Actually, the original might be if I remembered it more fully, but this version isn't...exactly.)
I don't believe the Weather Underground was ever a serious threat, except in their own minds, and in the press. When I looked around I saw dozens of easy targets that they just ignored. They were more publicity hounds than a revolutionary movement. AFAIK they didn't even have a platform of "What we would do if we were in charge".
And if you say Anonymous will become the same kind of thing, I have no trouble accepting it. But consider what you are saying. (I.e., they're just about there already.)
I really doubt that they would agree to something likely to put them out of business unless they were coerced.
I haven't been following things, but my presumptions are:
1) the business is (essentially) innocent
2) there was no warrant
3) The FBI used "main force"
4) They'll get away with it again
Will they find evidence? Maybe. Did they shut down the business? Almost certainly.
That said, these are initial presumptions. Some comments have caused me to believe that this time the FBI didn't seize servers that will actually put the company out of business. But I've heard of no evidence of a warrant, so I'm assuming that they've acted as they did in a few other cases that I've heard of.
The actions of the FBI that I've heard of do not indicate that they are very interested in protecting the rights of the accused. And also that if they doubt that they'll be able to get enough evidence to convict their target, that they are willing to use extra-legal means to cause them severe financial damage. In one case where I'm personally aware, the (eventually) accused was able to get a decent pro-bono lawyer. (He couldn't hire one, because all his assets had been seized.) Last I heard he'd been fighting the charge for years. Not many pro-bono lawyers will support you through that. He's probably going to loose. Because he has expenses that he can no longer meet. But, I'll admit, this was the DEA not the FBI, so that poor evidence, even though it does shape the lens through which I read these stories. (The charge? He was a doctor charged with prescribing too much pain medication for cancer patients on welfare.)
Perhaps I shouldn't think of the FBI the same way, but reports in the news show that they follow a similar pattern of behavior, so I think that it *IS* fair.
I think in the US the form Kindergarden is preferred, though my spell-checker disagrees.
Actually, things written 100 years ago will probably not be covered. But things written today will be covered 100 years from now.
The difference is that most works written 100 years ago probably had the copyright lapse at some point during that century. And from that time forwards they were not covered. The laws changed sometime after 1980. (In the US...different times elsewhere. After WWII, I believe, everywhere.)
N.B.: In the US works written in 1923 may still be within copyright, depending on how the copyright was handled. (Renewals, etc.), but things written in 1915 aren't. On the years in between, I'm not certain. (But notice that the "Lord of the Rings" was out of copyright in the US in the 1970's because it was published first in Britain. And US law at that time required that for a work to be copyright in the US it could not have been published earlier in another country. (Read the back of the Ballentine Edition of the Lord of the Rings. I'm not sure about the current editions, but the first ones made a point that Ballentine had chosen to pay Tolkien royalties, where Ace had not.
A decade or two? Ah, yes. Long enough that knowing what they were doing becomes irrelevant, because now someone else is the one in charge. When that happens, prosecutions somehow don't follow, so there are NO effective repercussions to doing whatever they feel like.
There's more than one reason that "Justice delayed is justice denied" is a correct statement.
Yes, because you don't just need to delete the names, you need to hide the events that would allow the sources to be identified. Figuring out just which events those are can be quite difficult.
I do consider promulgating beliefs without evidence that I will accept to encourage others into actions that I feel will harm others to be, itself, harmful.
It's ok for me to feel this way, because I'm not a lawmaker. If I were...I'd have to consider my own beliefs dangerous. Not, however, necessarily as dangerous that those of the other legislators around.
I consider ALL centralized authority to be an evil. This extends to authoritative nameservers. We need to create workable mesh networks to take the place of the current web structure. We probably need multiple networks of trust. I wouldn't trust RMS to pronounce on quantum theory, and I wouldn't trust Hawking to design philosophies of trust. Trusted parties need to be categorized as to where they are to be trusted. And we also need degrees of trust. An all or nothing system isn't going to be the answer.
This means that in my beliefs, whenever someone is acting to centralize power, they are, inherently, doing evil. This is true despite what they intend to accomplish by the centralized power they obtain. Abd the minimum amount of evil that they are doing is directly proportional to the degree to which they centralize power. A good kind will be succeeded by a bad king, but the power once gathered will not be dispersed by it's holder.
OTOH, it's worth noticing that for some purposes we don't seem to have any alternative but the centralization of power. This remains an evil, which acts continuously to counterbalance any good that is done through the exercise of that power. (And to amplify any evil.)
So... mesh networks are a partial answer, but what about power generation? Water distribution? Etc. For some purposes it doesn't look like an answer is currently conceivable. Dense populations seem to impose constraints that require the centralization of control over resources. But we still need to find ways away from this. (Note, however, that need does not imply capability. And, like good, evil comes in degrees.)
But to me the spreading of false information is an evil. The spreading of seductive information that cannot be shown to be true is also an evil, and perhaps a worse one. (But consider the difference between British and American libel law. Things aren't all that clear.)
If I'm recalling my history correctly, in Rome c. 0 C.E. the only form of marriage that had any legal standing was a contract. Only parties with significant property holdings bothered with it. It generally worked fairly well.
Personally, I'm in favor of marriage. But it needs to be looked at as a civil contract with a standard format (subject to amendments, essentially prenuptial agreements). And I see no reason why any two sentient and consenting entities shouldn't be allowed to marry if they choose. I'd even allow multi-party marriages, but that, or course, would require a custom contract.
For that matter, if two such entities choose to co-habit without such an agreement, that's ok with me too. But it might well be to the disadvantage of one party or the other...or even both.
You're focusing on superficials. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Starbucks. What's wrong is the Mega-Church building itself.
Actually, even the Mega-Church building would be reasonable if it were being put to some ends beyond the furtherance of centralized power. (Well, some ends, not just any old ends.)
What's wrong with the Mega-Churches is the exact same thing that's wrong with the Mega-Corporations. They no longer serve their original purpose, but are instead mere vehicles for the creation of centralized power. (In the case of the church, this was very intentionally crafted into the structure of it by Emperor Constantine, or perhaps his advisers. Creators of that eminently Christian slogan "In hoc signo vincis.")
Reality impaired is a good name for you. As you slide over, there's no way to determine who the affiliates are. So to claim that you authorized those (previously) unknown people to spam you is ... peculiar. It's at most legally true, and not true in any ethical, moral, or sensible way.
Then there's the matter of reading all the agreements on the web sites that you have signed up at. This is, frankly, impossible. They change those things without notice to those who have previously agreed to them, and there's commonly a phrase in there that claims that it's YOUR responsibility to keep yourself informed. Clearly an impossible chore. And intentionally so.
I don't believe that those agreements are legally valid, particularly since there is no way for you to prove that you didn't agree to something that someone falsely claims you agreed to. IANAL, so my opinion on this doesn't carry much weight, but *I* am certainly not going to accept that I am responsible for something that I don't believe I agreed to. And someone showing me a web page that they claim is the agreement isn't likely to convince me. I know how quickly those can be changed. (They could change them to whatever they choose for 10 seconds every midnight. Do what they are now authorized to do. And then change it back. I'd never know.)
This is, however, why I prefer to only agree to licenses that I trust. Like the GPL. But this doesn't mean I'm going to believe that it's just to hold people trapped by the above described shenanigans to those agreements. People have limited amounts of time and limited fields of understanding. This is true of everyone. Requiring that everyone be an expert in some particular field is grossly unjust.
Such investigations, however, *don't* commonly include a demand that someone "turn over all your records" without a court order.
OK, I have not heard it alleged that any specific laws were broken or infringed.
That *is* more precise. But it means about the same.
While I agree entirely with what you say, I feel that you make one major mistake.
"The kinddom of god is within you"
Try taking that literally. LITERALLY.
I have had such an experience as I believe you are describing. I have had it several times in various different circumstances. Once at a Wicca ceremony, once immediately after an intense encounter. (Don't know quite how to describe it. It was a splinter group off of EST related to the rebirthing movement.) A few other times.
My conclusion is that the entities described are real, but not external. That they are a part of the mechanism of the mind, and are probably related to the psychoid processes that C.G. Jung called Archetypes. And that many of them are pre-human. (There isn't just one, but it also isn't possible to draw clear boundaries around them. Think of them as activations of sections of the neural net that is the brain that normally aren't made consciously accessible.)
There's no reason to think that it didn't come from space. We know that complex organic molecules are synthesized in the dust clouds. Now the question is *what* came from space?
When I was a teenager I came up with what I called the "cosmic garbageman" theory for the evolution of life. Picnickers leaving garbage behind. There's no reason to believe it didn't happen, but it doesn't seem to be a necessary precondition.
Then there's panspermia. Another idea that's vaguely plausible if you believe that "spontaneous creation" is too unlikely. This only requires life to develop a civilization once in a galaxy. It's possible. I don't think it's the way to bet, but there's no proof that it didn't happen that way. (That would require finding life somewhere else that had a radically different underpinning in a similar environment. And even that could be handled if you presume two eco-system-civilizations launching spores into space. We could probably do it now if we felt like it.
These are ways of handling the problem if you feel that life is too unlikely. But I don't feel any need to adopt them. They seem like excess baggage.
Actually single mutational events can be retracted. And this does occasionally happen.
The reason we tend to say that evolution can't be reversed is basically entropy, i.e., the same reason you can't unscramble an egg (if you haven't gotten to the point of turning on the fire).
I'd say that it was fair to call it an irreversible process except that occasionally single mutational events are reversed exactly. But the process is generally so complex that the chance of this happening is generally extremely slight. And instead you get something like a dolphin or orca instead of a shark.
Yeah, I'm being picky. I'm a programmer, what did you expect.
Yeah. People have trouble with wrapping their heads around evolution.
Most change is detrimental. Most changes don't survive.
Some changes are advantageous in particular environments. These will tend to survive. Then the environment in which they lives changes, and they'll be wiped out.
So it's beneficial if you can come up with a way to insulate yourself from changes in the environment. But if it's too expensive, then it will be detrimental, and it won't survive.
Evolution is a process of tripination. (Decimation is killing one out of ten, so I coined tripination to mean killing one out of three. It still understates the case.) Changes happen and are killed off. The occasional survivor is what we see. And chance plays a large role in two places. First chance determines which mutations, out of all those that are currently viable, actually occur. Secondly chance plays a large role in selecting among those candidates while there are still only a few copies of a change. (See "The law of large numbers" and probability theory.)
People aren't good at selecting gambling odds, either, for similar reasons. They can't wrap their heads around probability. Evolution is worse, though, because you're dealing with cumulative change and death. Both of those are concepts that people don't deal well with.
But arguing against "The popular concept of evolution" isn't arguing against evolution, and shouldn't be framed as such. Changing the name wouldn't help, as people have a hard time understanding the ideas, and if they are afraid of death they'll likely just refuse to think about it.
Exactly *what* private data is Google intending to profit from? It makes a big difference.
If what they're doing is collecting bank account passwords, then, yes it's nefarious, even though the data was unencrypted.
If what they're doing is associating IPs with geo-locations, as they claim, I don't really like it, but I don't see anything really wrong. And it's clear how they could profit from that information.
They claim to be doing the second, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. They claim to have collected some data of the first sort by accident. I wish they'd destroy it, though I understand why they can't at the moment.
There's a couple of federal agencies that are supposed to be investigating this. One has cleared Google of malice and basically said "Go and sin no more". The other is still considering. These agencies have proper grounds, and have been dealt with reasonably. The Connecticut AG is a grandstanding politico on the make. He doesn't have grounds. He doesn't have a case. He's making political speeches. Google correctly told him to come back with a warrant, and he's trying to figure out something that he can escalate into grounds for one. Given that he just needs to find one pliable judge, he will likely get a warrant for something eventually. It won't be just, but it's the kind of corruption of the justice system that politics encourages.
What Google should have done was heavily redacted the documents, and then destroyed the originals before announcing the problem. Hindsight is marvelous. And it's too late to do it now without massive consequences.
Do I trust Google? No. But in this particular case I trust Google more than I trust the Connecticut A.G.
On the part of the Connecticut AG it *is* a fishing expedition. And he has no probable cause to suspect that any law was broken. (Should he have? Possibly. But that would require different laws.)
Note that the request for data didn't come from either of the federal agencies that you identified. (And it should still be handled via the courts and judicial warrants.)
What percentage of the cases would you expect to find out about? Why? I'm actually surprised that any were found. (Not that any happened, that any were found.) This seems, to me, to indicate that it happens an unsettlingly large percentage of the time.
And no, 4-4.5 years ago isn't a long time ago. You have to allow time for the incident to be proven, and court cases can run decades. (Not usually, but it's not uncommon either.)
I'll grant that Google is probably capable of providing itself with a decent defense, but it also has image and stockholders to think about. In this case, among at least some population segments, it doesn't lose face by not acquiescing to an intrusive governmental request. But corporations often do, and without any need for laws to be broken. (Except, of course, by disclosing information to the government that is forbidden by contractual agreement except under a court order, but without the formality and bother of there actually being a court order.)
That's ok though. They'll change the EULA on their web page so that it's technically legal...at least arguably so, and claim that since the agreement now reads that you agreed to these terms, that makes them the terms that you agree to.
I don't think very much of the morals of the people who run either corporations or the government. But Google, so far, is doing better than most. (But I still wouldn't trust them with my data in the cloud. Unless it was strongly encrypted.)
There are other good explanations (see other posts), but perhaps the other governments didn't want individual identifiers, and Connecticut does? Perhaps Connecticut just said "Give me all the data you colleced" and the others said "Give us the information you collected which you shouldn't have under our laws".
That sounds to me not only plausible, but reasonable. And Connecticut couldn't have said the same thing, because there weren't any laws to break. (But note that Germany, etc., would only have been given data about their own denizens, where if Connecticut was asking that way, it would be asking for everything.)
Sorry, that bit was almost a joke. (Though I haven't heard it claimed that it's good for you, and I'm not going intentionally go looking for misinformation. The bit about "swimming in cold water" is based around pigs eating copra, and laying down a layer of unmetabolized coconut fat, i.e., copra. So the pig fat didn't end up tasting right. It would, however, be good insulation for swimming in cold water, which the polynesians did/do a bunch of. And the polynesians tend to have a genetic mod which causes their fat layers to be distributed all over their body. So it's not totally a joke.
As for fish...yeah, the omega-3's are for fish (non-homeothermic) that swim in cold water. This doesn't mean that we use it the same way. Our biochemistrys (homeothermic) are significantly different. Most of the data used to recommend it are based around population studies rather than around theories. And I trust the population studies more than I trust ANY of the current theories. (Though they *can* hide significant variables that people just didn't think to look for.)
Some of the problems with personalized medicine are certainly economic. But a far cry from all, or even most, of them. E.g., many variations exist in personal biochemistry, but we don't know which ones are significant. This would require long term studies of a significant fraction of the worlds population, after identifying each participant by they proteome as well as by their genome. Just not doable. Perhaps at some point we'll be able to make a retrospective study, but then we'll need to identify exactly which choices which people made, how significant they were, and to what extent they were driven by physiology. (E.g., it's well know that generally men are more interested in eating meat than women? Is this important physiologically? Beneficial or harmful? To what extent? It is driven by physiology or custom? We'd need to do that kind of analysis for each metabolic variation.)
Basically, we just don't really know enough.
P.S.: If you heard the tone as whining, I think that says more about you than about me, because I don't feel that way. The fact that in the absence of hard data I feel I must gamble I consider to be a common part of the human condition. (And, for that matter, of the animal and plant condition.) This is because time is, so far as we know, irreversible.
Maybe what the trick with vinegar does is cause it to percipitate before being digested? (Though I think the explanation I heard was more along the lines of "All acetates are soluble", so iron acetate will go into solution, where iron oxalate would be insoluble.)
That was my first question too. The answer appears to be "No".
What they're claiming is that the evidence seems to indicate that the hypothesis that aging is caused by free radicals is false. This doesn't mean that free radicals are beneficial. (Sometimes they are beneficial. E.g., they are known to sometimes be one of the defenses used invading bacteria. This, however, doesn't mean that they are more generally beneficial.)
The suggestion was made that the purpose of the free-radicals is to activate the cell's stress repair mechanism. This seems a bit dubious to me, but evolution often doesn't design things in the most straight-forward way. So I can't just say "That's too silly to believe" as is my immediate desire.
Basically they're saying is "The evidence refutes the idea that free-radicals cause aging. We don't know why the are created. And we don't know what causes aging. Does anyone have any good ideas?"